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Why I run FreeBSD for my home servers (2024)

(aumont.fr)
185 points psxuaw | 3 comments | 31 Mar 25 12:59 UTC | HN request time: 0.631s | source
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dangus ◴[31 Mar 25 16:19 UTC] No.43536745[source]▶
Just another “I don’t like systemd and refuse to understand it” rant.

I can’t think of any change that has improved my Linux sysadmin experience more than the move to systemd.

Is it complicated? Perhaps it is. But this FUD about it being resource intensive or unreliable or difficult to use is complete nonsense.

And on top of that systemd isn’t even “Linux.” Plenty of popular production-ready distros like Alpine Linux don’t even use it.

And of course I’m not saying FreeBSD is bad, but I’m not the one writing and publishing an article bashing a system I don’t understand.

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whalesalad ◴[31 Mar 25 16:20 UTC] No.43536765[source]▶
systemd is indeed awesome. i'd rather kms than go back to maintaining init.d scripts.
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throw0101d ◴[31 Mar 25 16:25 UTC] No.43536822[source]▶
> systemd is indeed awesome. i'd rather kms than go back to maintaining init.d scripts.

systemd-as-init-replacement was probably fine. systemd-as-kitchen-sink can get annoying.

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1. webstrand ◴[31 Mar 25 16:35 UTC] No.43536937[source]▶
But where does the init system end and the kitchen-sink begin? For instance do you consider networking to be part of init or is it something else. For me, I bring network up in initramfs, so it's definitely part of my init.

The only truly bad systemd-* I've worked with is systemd-journald. Which often fails to contain log entries that should be present or simply just corrupts itself.

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2. throw0101d ◴[31 Mar 25 20:38 UTC] No.43539677[source]▶
> But where does the init system end and the kitchen-sink begin?

resolved, timesyncd, homed, journald, networkd (was very happy with Debian's interfaces(5)). Never thought of mounting file systems as process control, so also add mounting and taking over fstab. Given the ever-growing number of 'sub-systems', I'm sure new ones have been created that I'm not aware of. (I'm personally most regularly annoyed by resolved, especially as a server sysadmin where I need DNS to be deterministic, and not clever: I've gotten to the point of doing a chattr +i /etc/resolv.conf.)

I'm waiting for a systemd-mail so Zawinski's Law can be fulfilled:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski's_Law

> For me, I bring network up in initramfs, so it's definitely part of my init.

I've run Solaris, IRIX, BSD, and 1990s Linux, and I've never thought of networking as related to process control (init).

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3. dangus ◴[02 Apr 25 03:54 UTC] No.43553525[source]▶
Just one example of what I like about systemd, and maybe you can call me new school, but I've really grown to like journald/journalctl.

Having systemd units automatically categorized and queryable has been very nice (the -u flag). The tag flag has also been great for me.

The --since and --until flags are godsends, I don't really care to waste time converting timestamps in my brain when all I want to do is do something like journalctl -u my_service --since yesterday --until today.

To me a way to centralize logs and have a tool like this to query them in a relatively advanced way is a major benefit.

I find that the complaints about systemd are mainly about UNIX philosphy and not about the actual functionality and benefits of those design choices. It seems like even mentioning that it's good brings back all these 2014 arguments about it.

You brought up mounting, the second paragraph of the systemd-mount manual quite clearly explains the benefit and what makes it different than the lower level mount command. And really it's not like systemd is ripping away your old tools especially in that particular case.